Human-machine dialog systems can enable natural language interactions between humans and machines. Typically, these systems convert the human natural language input into a machine-readable form. In some cases, these systems may include automatic error detection algorithms, which attempt to identify segments of the machine-readable version of the input that contain errors. If an error is detected, these systems may utilize a simple error correction mechanism that only addresses specific, obvious types of errors and only responds to the detected errors with non-specific requests to “please rephrase” the input.